Help with my build (returning player)
Aside from trait spread it looks almost like a spinoff of the Tankcat build which got killed when they nerfed Confusion (and I think Retaliation). But you should take a look at current doublt kit condi bomb builds. Also condition builds are generally not advised for PvE.
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Double_Kit_Condi_Roamer
Ok, I’ve looked through that bomb build and played a little more, there are a couple things I seem to be missing.
1) Is toughness really that far superior to vitality? I thought a 10:1 ratio was optimal but it seems like vitality gets ignored completely. As I recall conditions also don’t even take toughness or armor into account …
Anyways, likely all a moot point given WvW still seems to be one big zerg and then a 5 man camping every entrance so the soloers can’t get out … Not even a day in and I remember why this game got uninstalled. Boring unchallenging PvE, repetitive PvP and boring as hell WvW.
Did I say boring? I meant stupid :/ I thought they had the game set up so the burst wasn’t as bad as other MMOs, and here I am, 1v1 and a rogue shows up behind me, 100 to 0 within 2 seconds despite having stacked toughness and vitality …
2 seconds is quite a long time to not dodge away…
dunno what you try to achieve with your 10:1 ratio, but that’s not how gw2 works. Your stats will barely save your bum from time to time, but definitively not carry you through a fight. incomming damage must be mitigated by blocks, invuln, blindness, aegis or – most importantly – proper dodging.
Anyways, A-net managed to deliver 2 awesome games that hit the taste of the millions of players who still play it / discovered it for them recently. If you are not one of them: bad luck I guess. Maybe other, rather slow-paced mmo’s will fit your playstyle more than the risk-rewarding and reflex-based combat of gw2.
but lets go back to the example with your thief:
a thief will not attack while in stealth since that puts reveal on him (still there are rare cases where they actually willingly get reveal for some power-boost). so if you knew the class and knew what skill they used to stealth you can roughly predict when their first strike will come: the second they loose stealth.
so your job is it to dodge right in that moment or get your block up. It really is that simple to mess with their pace and enforce your own on them. stealth not only limits your vision on them, but also their attack-pattern on you, so use that fact to turn the tides against the stealth-using thief.
and even if you miss that point, shield 5 will always throw them over the edge, allowing you to stunlock them further and kill them quite fast.
edit: and what the F do you expect from that build anyways?
starting with your runes:
150 condi-dmg and 20% bleed duration is all you get from stacking afflicted and krait.
now look into what krait would give you if you were running all 6 of them: 175 condi-dmg and 45% bleed-duration, along with some pretty neat proc for your elite. And that rune is not even your best bet for condi-dmg. look into balthazar f.e.
your stats:
…
you know what: forget about it.
delete that build completely, reconsider what you want to run (tell me so) and I give you a build that accomplishes quite that. from what I can see the whole build is a outdated mess with a broken concept behind it. No offense against you, I really wanna help you get what you want, but it is impossible to derivate anything from that base you have there.
I will create a exotic build with as cheap as possible components for whatever you want to run. Just type your wishes and I’ll respond tommorrow with something that will be fun for you to play.
things that help:
tell me your favorite utilities, kits & weapons / if you rather want to deal direct or condi-dmg / if you want to be more tanky or rather offensive / how important mobility is for you, a.s.o.
last but not least: tell me what content you want to run with the build in question (pve, pvp, wvw).
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
(edited by Arantheal.7396)
I’ll take you up on that actually.
Just a note on the example, I was fighting 1v1 against someone else (not a thief) and the thief pops out and gibs me. The fight was actually relatively even until the thief just shows up and destroys me (this is also why I couldnt immediately dodge or really do much at all).
Ok, so, I am looking for some form of build that would be effective in WvW. The build I posted happens to be what I have, which means I likely need to grind whatever gear is needed for another one.
A few questions for my education:
- Have they nerfed bleeds since release? Or condi in general, I remember this build doing decently because it would build up stacks and then the damage was essentially insurmountable despite healing.
- Have they changed the rune stats ? I remember 3/3 being optimal at the time.
- Is this whole ascended armor thing new?
Now for the actual build:
- I liked the tankyness, but my recent experience is that either tanky isn’t really possible, or at least it isn’t stat based (i.e. tanky is having tons of endurance regen and defensive cooldowns). Is that correct?
- I am essentially always solo because my schedule and play times are unpredictable so I can’t really commit to a guild.
- I really like the condi builds … should I maybe just roll a necro? An added bonus is that rebuilding a necro from the ground up would force me to actually play it a lot more before max level. That being said I do love the engi, and I already have one too.
- I essentially would just be playing WvW and PvE (dungeons or storyline).
- What I have is essentially that build plus a few soldiers/valkyries items and I think one berzerkers item. If there is any kind of item released somewhat recently, I have none of it. I also have a couple spare carrion pistols I think. Also have jeweller and huntsman maxed, 10 gp, some WvW badges and maybe a few dungeon tokens (but likely not enough for an item).
- Things I liked … really all the non-static engi stuff. Not a fan of turret builds or bombs. At some point I ran a silly high damage grenade build (while levelling, not max level gear).
One last question, Is the endgame still the same 8 or so dungeons and the one Orr zone, or is there some more stuff added since then? I have heard of fractals being a thing but have no clue if they are something I am interested in or not.
(edited by Sixes.5824)
just gonna let you know that I’m here and typing the responses now (gonna edit it into this post (lotta questions you have there^^))
>- Have they nerfed bleeds since release? Or condi in general?
no.
>- Have they changed the rune stats ?
yes. To counter stacking of various runes they have increased the effectiveness of all rune-steps the more you go into it to make full sets of runes more effective than mixing them. this is also why it is impossible now to select each rune individually now for pvp. you have to just select a specific set and get all effects from it.
>- Is this whole ascended armor thing new?
Yes. they have gradually introduced ascended trinkets / weapons and armor to the game. they require many resources and gold to craft, also they need their respective crafting-professions on rank 500 (as opposed to the old rank 400 maximum). that holds true for armor and weapons, trinkets on the other hand can be obtained for laurels, pristine fractal relics, wvw-badges and/or guild recommendations. obtaining a ascended backpack is the most difficult taks of them all, requiring excessive fractal-grind or many resources for the mystical forge. search the wiki and/or crafting guides for the various items. Also legendaries got upgraded to feature ascended stats, so if you ever got one, you already have access to all ascended stats on it. Anyways, ascended armor only increases your stats by roughly 5% in coparrison to exotic, but the higher base-dmg modifier of ascended weapons is quite important, and trinkets actually give a significant stat-boost in comparison to exotic, so you really should get both weapons and trinkets as soon as you can afford / craft them.
>- I liked the tankyness, but my recent experience is that either tanky isn’t really possible, or at least it isn’t stat based (i.e. tanky is having tons of endurance regen and defensive cooldowns). Is that correct?
To some extend, yes. Toughness still reduces the direct damage you take drastically (roughly 50% to 2/3rd’s if you go full toughness), still your healthpool will not save you for long so boons like protection, the correct buff-food and trait / skill-based defensive cd’s are just as if not even more important to survive a blast. At the end of the day, only proper positioning, dodging and knowledge about your opponents class (and – from what you can see – about his build) will make you into a viable combatant.
>- I really like the condi builds … should I maybe just roll a necro?
Yes and no. Necros have superior capabilities to manage and control conditions during a fight, but about raw availability and condi-damage, the engineer puts out a quite as heavy punch as the necro. still necro is the engis natural hardcounter (due to them being able to send our own condis back to us and us not having enough condi-clears to deal with that load) so don’t expect to win against skilled necros often when playing a condi-build on engi. against most other classes we still shine, tho. If you were to run a power-based build, you could even destroy necros all day long with all the cc’s engis bring naturally anyways.
>-One last question, Is the endgame still the same 8 or so dungeons and the one Orr zone, or is there some more stuff added since then?
Fractals got a rework, so they feature new maps. Orr and frotgorge are not the only lvl 80 maps anymore, 2 smaller but densely-packed maps got added: Drytop and Silver wastes. Both maps feature unique and numerous event-chains, a desert-biome, offer highly rewarding farms and in general awesome loot. Along with those maps, a new replayable story-line got added, but since you just came back you have to unlock the story-chapters for 200 gems each. Depending on how much you like the lore it might be worth it, but appart from the achievements you won’t be able to complete, the story itself can be played by getting invited into the story-instances from other other players, so you can still experience the story-content without purchasing it for your account yourself.
Also, in case you have quited gw2 early after launch: southsun cove is another new map, featuring a shore / beach biome, filled with various events, new creatures and new crafting-ingredients as well as drytop and silver wastes do.
build for wvw comming next:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQJAqelUUpErtbxkLseRCbBNqxAqJIyNWlPHhAkUA-TFyCwAOUCC4BBgT9nT7Pow8XK9EUOhAHV+RKgF1VB-w
(if you have questions how to run it, simply ask)
build for PvE comming next:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fdAQFAUlUUpEr1axLLseNSbBNqwA6TMi2+5GGgjC-TFSBwAFV+Rb/hIKBvp+DKdEIM/l/BBA4CCIGA9A-w
keep might stacked up with FT #2 + #4 and throw mine
rotate between rifle #3 / #5, grenades #2 / #4, grenade barrage, FT #2 and minefield for damage.
also use the correct slaying-potions for the respective dungeons, else go with the toxic sharpening stones.
and again, ask if you have questions.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
(edited by Arantheal.7396)
Wow, that is very thorough, thank you.
I did leave within a few months of launch (mostly got tired of never being able to WvW due to queues at that time) so all three new maps you described are new to me. I’ll have to look into all these ascended items, I have some badges and laurels so maybe I can get some relatively quickly. I am also a 400 huntsman so hopefully I can manage to upgrade my weapon soon enough.
For starters I am going to set up for that PvE build (at least trait and skill wise, with the gear I have it will be a more balanced stat approach) and then build towards the WvW one. These new zones should give me something to explore, I remember being so tired of killing zombies.
queues in wvw kinda got fixed.
ofc the scored wvw-maps still feature a player-cap so playing on a gold-league server might be frustrating if you don’t que up early.
But for those caught in the que there is a new, unranked map, opening as many copies of itself as players are there to fill it. This map is called edge of the mist and accesible via the WvW-interface. it is quite different from the actual wvw maps, especially since a match on it only lasts for 4h before the map gets reseted and restarted (usually 10min downtime after each 4h). Mostly it’s a xp-and badge-farm for upscaled characters or people that want a quick ticket to the next WvW-rank, still you can find some solo-roamers on them. since the 3 corners on itare quite imbalanced, red has the hardest time and green the easiest one. the corner you get assigned to depends on the color of your server in its current matchup.
Since you said that you rather roam solo instead of running with a zerg / a guild, there is another solution to fix your problem:
Transfer out of gold-leage and down to a bottom silver-leage / top-bronze leage server. They have much lower WvW-player numbers. They barely produce any que and even if they do it almost never lasts longer than 10min. Still the players there are skill-full and get some awesome fights that usually don’t turn into a giant blobb-fest but actual challenging encounters that can turn out quite surprisingly.
I f.e. play on RoS in EU and I was never a happier WvW-roamer.
Transfering costs a load of gems, but in case you want to start over anyways, one option would be to delete all your characters and transfer for free then (you still keep everything in your bank-slot and all currencies / badges you have). leveling in gw2 is quite fast anyways, and even faster so with certain methods (crafting, eotm farming, birthday-booster, buff-food, lvlup-scrolls). The only annoying thing would be to unlock all traits for your new characters, but compared to the costs of gems, that’s definitively the better option.
Oh, one other thing: roughly 1.5years after launch, a mega-server system got introduced, placing players from various servers on the same PvE maps. The original Servers only serve as “WvW-Teams”, so you don’t have to worry about deserted maps or impossible-to-complete PvE events due to a lack of players. All maps – regardless on which server you play – are densely populated and instances of them get opened and closed depending on the number of people wanting to play on them, so you never have to fear a queue for a world-boss again as well.
Have fun in Gw2.
A lot of things got a lot better after launch, and then there is a expansion to come in the next months as well.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
(edited by Arantheal.7396)
Oh ok cool, the PvE thing makes sense now, I was wondering how JQ still had so many people.
I’m likely going to stay on the same server and see how it goes. For now I have pulled out what old power gear I have for a balanced PvE approach. I checked out what was needed for an ascended weapon and good lord lol. I thought they didn’t want a gear grind in the game. Anyways, I have enough for the plans, I’ll slowly build up the materials for one new weapon.
the grind for these weapons is not that complicated, nor does it take long.
ofc it is expensive to up your crafting-profession to 500, but once that’s done you’ll see that you literally get spammed with ascended crafting-materials. it costs roughly 70-120g in raw materials to max out huntsman (use a crafting-guide, seriously), but once that’s done each weapon costs around 20g only. the account-bound materials are easily being farmed in drytop and silver-wastes, and the later even pumps out a steady flow of obsidian shards, so not even karma will be an issue for you.
I’d say getting a ascended weapon only takes roughly 1 week of farming dungeons (for gold) and silver-wastes (for the acc-bound materials). And after you have it, you will join the hordes of players, complaining about their inventory getting literally spamed with ascended materials.^^
edit:
use this guide
http://www.gw2crafts.net/huntsman_400.html
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
Hey Arantheal, I have played a bunch more and remembered why I wasn’t full rabid in the first place … it is a lot harder to get than carrion.
Which leads me to a couple more questions:
- Is the best way to acquire it still buying the named exotics on tp?
- Is it worth getting the exotics at all or would my 10ish gold be better used towards the ascended versions?
As an aside I have started leveling my huntsman to 500, more or less following the guide (needed a berzerker’s rifle so I crafted that along the way). It definitely won’t cost me full price as I am just going to farm up most of the ori and wood.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats
this link should help you out.
in essence, you can craft rabid, buy rabid from dungeon tokens (CM / AC), buy rabid from WvW-badges, and buy rabid from karma.
since you farm the mats yourself anyways, one exotic will cost you only ~2g since you can buy the insignia and combine it with leatherworker 400 right away without the need of a recipe.
components needed for all armor types, for rabid stats:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Rabid_Intricate_Gossamer_Insignia
edit:
and no, ascended armor only gives a 5% stat boost in comparison to exotic, so only weapons and trinkets are worth to go for directly. Play the build I gave you a bit with exotic armor (and the correct runes / sigils) to see for yourself how it feels. If you decide later on to make changes or switch it to something else, you will be happy to not have wasted 100’s of gold for ascended armor.
I made the same mistake in the beginning as well, by crafting PVT ascended armor that I now rarely use. Luckily I now have spare-sets of ascended celestial, berserker and Knight lying around (I was always more the power-engi type of player).
another tipp:
if you mix stat-types, always make sure your trinkets / weapons are the offensive part of the mix, since they yield better stats and therefore ensuring that you don’t end up as sitting duck, ready to be picked up by a bursty opponent.
That also means that you can craft rabid weapons / buy rabid trinkets right away without fearing that they ever become useless in your condi-build. The same goes for berserker on Power-builds as well.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.
(edited by Arantheal.7396)
You can buy rabid armor and trinkets from Orr Temples (Karma) and from WvW vendors(Badges). Just don’t put expensive runes you may want to be reused elsewhere because they can’t be salvaged. Rabid weapons can be bought from WvW vendors (Badges), but again not salvageable. They can also be crafted (except trinkets).
As for a condi build I’d probably lean towards this. I prefer the BK version, but that’s just me.
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Engineer_-_Double_Kit_Condi_Roamer
And in response to an earlier question of yours about nerfing conditions Confusion at least one did get nerfed (WvW). The build I referred to relied on getting a bunch of Confusion stacks and Retaliation up (also nerfed I think) and letting people wreck themselves. It was a very trollish build, but was tanky and fun. Unfortunately does not work in today’s game.
(edited by Sagramor.7395)
So, from what I can tell I should be:
- Spending a little gold to get the rabid exotic armor I am missing and slot in the runes because I will be using this for awhile.
- Maybe spend a little gold to get the rabid trinkets (I already have the exotic rabid pistol and shield). I should probably forgo the amulet given it is the strongest and cheapest ascended one so I can probably just get that soon.
- Save up laurels and WvW badges for ascended trinkets.
- Use mats to get my huntsman to 500 and then eventually craft the ascended rabid pistol.
- Generally save kharma because I need it for the ascended recipes?
Note that I am completely ignoring the PvE build for now. I’ll swap out a few pieces for my exotic zerkers/knights armor and my zerkers rifle and go hybrid or just go full condi in PvE.
edit:
Just checked, the rabid inscription is 2 gold 9 silver while Vatlaaw’s gear is all around 1 gold 30 silver. Is there any good reason not to just buy the Vatlaaw’s gear?
edit the second:
Turns out I wasn’t a complete idiot when I first played this character and I got the rabid chest and legs. I am going to wait at least a little on the other items as they have very few stats. I did however purchase 6 runes of the undead for under 6 silver which represents a much bigger leap in stats. The rabid trinkets … the list says craftable but I can’t seem to figure out how, the unique ones are a minimum 5 gold so I can’t really afford them right now. I’ll get the laurel+badge amulet relatively soon.
(edited by Sixes.5824)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Plague_
it says craft-able because this ring can be crafted from a acc-bound recipe drop in CM. you can not craft it without the recipe, and the recipe itself is acc-bound.
so yea, getting trinkets will be annoying, but on the other hand, 2 ascended accessories can be obtained by doing all guild-missions 4 weeks in a row (they only require around 1h per session, giving you 7 guild-recommendations, and for 12 you get 1 trinket, so 2 weeks for one, 4 weeks for both)
and ascended rings are even faster, and easier obtained:
you can buy one ring for 10 pristine fractal relics, and you get a guaranteed drop of them once every 10 fractal levels per day.
1-9 = one guaranteed relic per day
10-19 = one guaranteed relic per day
20-29 = one guaranteed relic per day
30-39 = one guaranteed relic per day
40-50 = one guaranteed relic per day.
if you run lvl 1, 10, 20, 30, and 40 you get 5 relics per day, so 2 rings in 4 days.
then again, agony prevents you from doing so (high-dmg condition that will kill you right on the spot, depending how much agony-resistance you have) so if you just do lvl 1 once daily (no agony on the levels 1-9 so beginners have it easier), you’re done in 20 days with your rings
and as you noticed, one amulet only costs 20 laures and 250 wvw badges anyways.
Engineer is love, Engineer is life.